In spite of recent network woes, the Solana blockchain’s smart contracts have continued to grow. As per data from Artemis, the number of unique contracts put on SOL’s network in March 2023 was at its highest in the year.
As of March 6th, 2023, nearly 140 new smart contracts were deployed compared to 92 at the beginning of the year.
A smart contract is an automated program that runs on the blockchain and whose main function is to automate the execution of contracts between parties.
A unique contract, on the other hand, is a special kind of smart contract deployment that uses a contract code intended to be one-of-a-kind and unreplicable.
These are used to produce one-of-a-kind digital goods, such as collectibles or artwork, in the context of non-fungible tokens [NFTs].
A new NFT collection on the network might appear shortly given the rise in the deployment of unique contracts on Solana.
However, the NFT sales statistics are a bit concerning, as data from CryptoSlam showed that Solana’s NFT sales volume fell by about 30% over the previous month.
Despite the plummeting figures in the volume metric, the number of NFT transactions per program on the blockchain increased in recent times.
One of the biggest NFT marketplaces, Magic Eden, also revealed a comparable rise in transactions per program for Solana.
Additionally, according to data from DeFiLlama, SOL’s network values surged in the TVL count over the past few days.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO and co-founder of Solana, recently presented a roadmap that emphasized speed and scalability improvements while noting that maintaining stability remained a difficulty.
Solana Founder Laid Down A Plan Addressing Network Outage
According to the blog post, till the 1.14 release, core engineers were trying to resolve real-time issues that were affecting the network’s speed and usability.
These issues included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions and fee markets, spiraling ram, storage, and restart overhead, TronWeekly reported.
“Over the last 12 months, Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have also been working to improve the network and will continue to do so with a focus on stability,” the blog read.
Yakovenko’s announcement came after the previous week’s 1.14 network update where the network faced a slowdown in block production on Feb. 25.
The incident caused massive disruptions to transactions and forced validators to downgrade the software in a bid to restore network performance.